Lync 2013 and the Lync Room System (LRS), the new collaboration experience

With the introduction of Lync 2013, Microsoft launched the concept of the Lync Room System (LRS). The LRS is a concept of porting the Lync experience into a pc connected to a single or dual screens. Microsoft has found several hardware vendors to partner with:

Crestron (known from executive controls of AV equipment in the boardrooms of multinations)

Polycom (OEM of Crestron)

SMART Technologies (known from touch screens in the education sector)

Lifesize originally joined the program but stepped out.

The advantage of the LRS is that the Lync experience can be extended to a group of people in a room. They can share their screen with touchscreen technology and collaborate with people remotely in another office, at home or people on the road or on their mobiles.

On the 18 February 2014 at the Lync Conference in Las Vegas all the vendors were finally able to show their systems together. Some very interested upcoming features coming up in the next release are described by (i.e. the new VIS role):

users on the road via Wifi (i.e. in a hotel) with Lync on their laptop

users at home with Lync 2013 on their home pc

mobile or fixed phones dialing in via PSTN

All together joining in a single session and share voice, video and desktop sharing and collaborate with a single experience.

Video interoperability between Lync and Room based Videoconferencing.

So you will ask, what about my videoconferencing systems? I don’t want to throw away my investment I made earlier. You don’t have to, but expect them to be used next to each other in stead of combining them. In current release of LRS, it is not possible to dial-out, so it’s not possible to dial into a video Multi Conferencing unit or single system.

There are rumors that this will be solved in a next release, but expect and I would advise to keep it to a single Lync only experience.

1 comment

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